Supporting Same Sex Marriage

Supporting Same Sex Marriage

Supporting Same Sex Marriage

. At a time when the country faces economic nightmares and two hideous wars, thorny issues of social policy may well be shelved for some time. The selection of Rick Warren shows that while Obama is on our side, his biggest goal is to unite a divided nation.
I celebrate the fact that we live in a pluralistic society, with many different worldviews and lifestyles. I support the democratic process and believe that civil society is at its best when people with different perspectives engage in a mutually respectful dialogue.
anyone--anyone!--who tries to make a scriptural case against same-sex marriage is guilty of "the worst kind of fundamentalism."
For many of us, "normalizing" same-sex marriage comes down to deep concerns about the raising of our children and grandchildren. What will they be taught about sexual and family values in our schools? How will they be affected by the ways the entertainment media portray people with our kinds of views? There has been a lot of joking that gay is the new black. It's actually more like the old black: more Rosa Parks than Barack Obama. It is a mark of how far we have to go that the crumbs we are given--a sentence in a speech in Chicago--look so momentous to us. While we celebrate the election of a post-racial candidate, our own post-gay goals are almost embarrassingly modest. We are focused on legalizing our relationships to the people we love, not on electing a gay president. It was AIDS that spurred gay people and then our friends and families to activism, and the past two decades' progress in gay rights owes everything to that activism. The fact that gay marriage is being seriously debated seems like a mark of extraordinary progress to us. Gay people today are almost incredulous that our antecedents had to live in a web of secrets and lies, sometimes going to jail for having sex with the person they loved. Every one of us hopes that our children will be equally hard-pressed to imagine...

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